Category Archives: Heritage

The Glasgow School of Art and Digital Design Studio had lots to show off this year for XPoNorth in Inverness, participating in several panels and and hosting an evening of drinks with friends and colleagues.

Some of this year’s best work was on display, including heritage, serious games, and medical projects from the student body, as well as additional projects by the Design students at the nearby Forres campus. The evening was capped off with a great slide presentation and fashion show displaying some recent pieces from GSA Textile Design students . All in all, a great event.

Last week, the BBC highlighted a 3D fly-through of the Mackintosh Building laser scan data that will be used to help with the building’s restoration and renovation. You can also catch a quick glimpse of the Visualisation lab at the DDS.

Back in October, Stuart Jeffrey, (Research Fellow in Heritage), Laura Hundersmarck (International Heritage Visualisation intern), and Mhairi Maxwell (Research Developer for International Heritage Visualization) took part in the Explorathon event at the National Museum of Scotland.

3D printer in tow, they joined astronomers, chemists, physicists and fellow archaeologists to showcase some of the most cutting-edge discoveries and technologies available today, and presented work from the ACCORD project: an endeavour to co-create 3D-models of archaeological sites and monuments that has been travelling across Scotland to work with local communities.

They outlined their work by video here, and details about Explorathon, and the other fantastic projects presented there, can be found here.

An opportunity to visit the Digital Design Studio here at Pacific Quay, Glasgow and chat with the lecturers involved with our Masters programmes:

MSc in Medical Visualisation and Human Anatomy

M.Des in Sound for the Moving Image

MSc in Visualisation (International Heritage)

MSc in Visualisation (Serious Games and Virtual Reality)

Academic Staff will be available from 1730hrs to 1930hrs that evening to meet with students interested in these programmes. Additionally we will include a short demonstration of our 3D capability in our purpose-built laboratory early in the evening.

In this TEDx talk, Dr. Paul Chapman, Deputy Director of the DDS, takes us on a journey describing how immersive systems, virtual reality, and computer graphics have progressed over the years. Paul also describes a ground-breaking international 3D scanning project and the creation of an immersive Battle of Bannockburn experience. This work is in collaboration with our colleagues at Historic Scotland.

We will be offering part-time on a day-release mode, with part-time students working alongside full-time students. Part-time students should expect to attend classes two days per week (with some flexibility where possible around work commitments) for the autumn and spring terms. The core-research skills class will be offered as a blended learning (part on-campus, part online) course during the summer between the two years of part-time study – we’ll be arranging a special delivery of the Academic Skills class just for part-time students for this.

We’ve had a number of enquiries for part-time study over the years, and we are excited that this will allow a wider range of students the opportunity to study with us at The Glasgow School of Art.

There are a number of places available for funded Masters study at the Digital Design Studio for study in 2015-16.

Interested applicants are encouraged to apply early to try to secure these places!

On all programmes there are a number of SFC (Scottish Funding Council) fee-waivers available – these cover the full costs of fees for Scottish (ordinarily resident in Scotland, not Scottish by birth!) and EU citizens. Additionally, there are a number of scholarships available – these vary, but mostly cover a portion of fees.

Notable this year are British Council supported GREAT scholarships which make a significant contribution to fees for students from India.

We currently still have limited funded places available on all of the Masters programmes:

A few days ago I had the fantastic (and nerve-wracking) experience of live radio, on BBC Worldwide’s Click radio broadcast. And in front of a live audience in BBC Scotland’s Pacific Quay headquaters! I sneakily took a photo of the audience before switching off my phone – just before the final group of audience members arrived. Standing room only at the back.

View of the audience at the live BBC Click recording

It felt like the programme was over almost as soon as it began – I had lots I wanted to say about the Scottish Ten and other DDS projects that I just didn’t manage. When pushed to answer in ten seconds how the data captured by the project is used, I somehow didn’t manage to give the example from Skara Brae, where Scottish Ten data from 2010 and data acquired by Historic Scotland in 2014 are being compared to help monitor the beach erosion that is threatening the site, and to help develop a management strategy to help protect this amazing world heritage site for future generations.

The podcast of the programme features some extra Q&A – and one of our PhD students, Jessica Argo, was able to discuss her project exploring the therapeutic use of ambisonic audio.

Getting to show the #bbcclickradio team around the DDS facilities before the programme was fun – and certainly less nerve-wracking. Gareth got to play with foley in the student recording studio, and then to experience a virtual Edinburgh in 3D – while only yards from BBC Scotland’s Glasgow headquarters.

You can listen to the programme here, or download the podcast with extra content from here (Podcast available until 12th March 2015).

A little overdue, posting this diary from Dr Stuart Jeffrey, research fellow in International Heritage Visualisation at the Digital Design Studio…

In May, a fire destroyed some sections of The Glasgow School of Art’s A-listed Mackintosh Building.

In response, two symposia have been planned to address the entire range of issues surrounding the restoration of the building. The first symposium took place in the city of Venice last month, timed to coincide with the Venice architectural biennale , an ideal venue in which to stress the international significance of Mackintosh as an architect and The Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh building in particular as an outstanding example of his work. It was also important for the symposia to have as broad an audience and set of contributors as possible and the biennale is already a major attraction for architects and architectural conservationists from around Europe and beyond.

My presentation was part of a series of 10 minute talks from an eclectic mix of speakers who gave a very broad range of perspectives. These talks set the tone for the symposium, making clear that all aspects of the fire and the School’s future response to it were open for discussion. Particularly successful in this regard was Kate Davidson, who opened the session by asking the audience to contemplate the psychological effects of grief and to consider the loss of the Mackintosh library in this context. This was followed by a range of scholarly and thoughtful presentations on topics such as the original construction processes, the reconstruction process, potential uses of the building in future and the place of artistic practice in planning a response.

I was given the opportunity to present to this large and diverse audience on the potential uses and re-uses of 3D digital data in the process of thinking about the future of the building. The GSA has benefitted from the unusual position of having existing 3D laser scans of the exterior of the building from 2009/10 and were also in the position to call upon Digital Design Studio scanning teams to start internal and external scanning as soon as it was safe to enter the building. This work took place within hours of the fire starting and was carried out by a joint team from Historic Scotland and the DDS, who have long experience of working together through the Scottish Ten project . It was gratifying that the potential uses of this data (as well as the uses it has already been put to as part of the building stabilisation process) were warmly received by the audience. Proposed uses included the visualisation of alternate rebuilding/reconstruction schemes, analysis of building material and techniques, and the development of a scan-to-CAD-to-BIM workflow to underpin all technical aspects of building work.

Laser scan of the Mackintosh Building

More speculative uses of the scanned dataset (and proposed new datasets) were also discussed and research avenues centring on disaster planning and disaster management were prominently highlighted. In addition to the utility of the data for the management of technical aspects of reconstruction schemes, I was also given the opportunity to discuss the potential for these data, and models generated from them, in engaging communities of interest such as the student body with the reconstruction process as it develops.

Overall, this event was challenging, thought provoking and enjoyable. For me personally, it was an rare opportunity to be exposed to the world of professional architecture and the types of arguments and debates that this world engages with and as I result I came away both better informed and inspired.

The Accord crew were on the road again this week and travelled back to Castlemilk where we met with Kenny Hunter, who is the artist responsible for ‘King of the Castle, and – we can proudly boast- a GSA alumni! Since it was erected in 1999, the artwork has enjoyed a rich and varied life – sometimes a proud Rangers supporter and other days a committed Celtic fan!! This rascal is much loved by the local community, and was chosen by the local ‘How Old Are Yew’ history group to be modelled in 3D. You can find a work-in-progress PDF of our 3D model in the attachment.

Jean Devlin, a member of the ‘How Old Are Yew’ group did a wee bit of extra research and wrote on the Castlemilk History facebook page:

The King of the Castle has had a wee restoration done on him just recently …
After further research by the Castlemilk History Group today, we found out that this was the caption which was on the original coating at the foot of “The King of The Castle”… “Somewhere in the distance is my Future”… It was written by a member of the Castlemilk writer’s group at the time, of which Des Dillon was the writer in residence …

King of the Castle by Kenny Hunter 1999Artist Kenny Hunter chatting to members of the How Old are Yew community group